Technological progress has merely provided us with more efficient means for going backwards. - Aldous Huxley

If the IRS has its way, cash will be a thing of the past. In its place, every transaction will be digital, every purchase will leave a footprint. And it will tell your story – where you go and what you buy while you are there.

By combining a cashless society and negative interest rates, they effectively flush out any hidden or saved wealth.

Worse, withdrawing and holding large sums of cash is now considered suspicious. Already in America, carrying large sums of cash is enough for the Feds to consider you a criminal.

The US government hates cash so much, it is prepared to rob it from its own citizens.

Under the disguise of a “War on Drugs” or a “War on Terror, “ they have clamped down on individuals storing, transferring, or carrying large amounts of cash through a procedure called civil forfeiture.

Just getting caught with a large wad of bills is enough for the Feds to consider you a drug lord or terrorist. Indeed, since 9/11 and despite some reforms, the Feds have confiscated $2.5 billion in cash from 61,998 seizures, roadside and elsewhere.

Author and social analyst Aldous Huxley originally published his classic futurist novel "Brave New World" in 1932. Like the works of family friend H.G. Wells, this was not merely speculation but an insider's exposition of the plans of the "world controllers" as he foresaw them at the time.

This is another of the classics that is well worth re-reading; it is amazing how many of the developments he predicted have since come to pass.

"Unless we choose to decentralize and to use applied science...as the means to producing a race of free individuals, we have only two alternatives to choose from:

a number of national, militarized totalitarianisms, having as their root the terror of the atomic bomb...

or else one supra-national totalitarianism, called into existence by the social chaos...and developing, under the need for efficiency and stability, into the welfare-tyranny of Utopia.

“We would like to be a catalyst for taking cash out of the system,” Apple CEO Cook said, his mind fixed on Apple Pay, which takes a cut on every transaction it processes.

Top of the list are the world’s central banks, which have the perfect motive for whacking cash: i.e. to make negative interest rates an eternal — or at least, more enduring — reality. And the only way to do that is to stop depositors from cashing out,

For credit card companies, cash is the ultimate rival. As such, it’s no surprise that the likes of Visa and MasterCard are among those pushing the hardest for a cashless economy.

As for politicians, Eurocrats and global plutocrats, including the senior servants of the IMF, World Bank and UnitedNations, they will enjoy even greater access to and dominion over the people’s funds. What better way of controlling the people than by controlling their access to the money they need to survive?

The Better Than Cash Alliance’s membership list includes Coca Coca and the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. Also on the list are the Citi Foundation, the US Agency for International Development (USAID), and the World Saving Banks Institute, which represents 7,000 retail and savings banks worldwide.

Member institutions range from powerful private foundations — including the Ford Foundation and the ClintonDevelopment Initiative — to a bewildering alphabet soup of UN organizations,

“Historically, we have relied on our community to help us understand what is fake and what is not.Anyone on Facebook can report any link as false, and we use signals from those reports along with a number of others — like people sharing links to myth-busting sites such as Snopes — to understand which stories we can confidently classify as misinformation. Similar to clickbait, spam and scams, we penalize this content in News Feed so it’s much less likely to spread.”

Relying on people’s personal assessments of possibly-false news items as the primary driver of what deserves to be branded with a Scarlet Letter “F” is a system destined to fail everyone before it even begins.

Facebook still does not provide the means to rebut post and link removals or the sudden unpublishing of pages — the platform has, in essence, a shoot first, ask questions later attitude when it receives a report something violated its Community Standards. This has already imperiled owners of perfectly legitimate pages with millions of fans to the arduous process of challenging unjustified reports and coping in the meantime with devastating loss of revenue.

“[t]o have one company that has enough power to reshape the way we think, I don’t think I need to describe how dangerous that is.” Snowden addressed the fake news issue in detail at Fusion’s Real Future Fair on Tuesday.

“I don’t think many people need to have this explained to them, that when you type something into the Google search box, it’s Google that decides what you get back. When you go to your Facebook page, it’s Facebook that decides what news it is that you see on your page. When you go to a platform like Twitter, or any of these, really, the voices that are heard are the ones that are selected and permitted by the corporation.”

Zuckerberg's enclosed his new property with, um, a wall. Indeed, a 6-foot-high stone wall said to be at least a mile in length that looks from photos as though it was constructed by the Emperor Hadrian to keep the Picts from raiding Roman military camps on the other side.

Natives complained that Zuckerberg used lawsuits to strong-arm them into selling their rights to their ancestral property for cheap.

"I got a call from a lawyer (representing Zuckerberg), saying I was an heir and I can sell for $500 or I can be summoned to go to court and basically our land would be auctioned from there," one of the descendants told a newspaper reporter. The lawsuit defendants planned to stage an anti-Zuckerberg demonstration on February 4 right outside the already infamous wall.

Stunned by the miserable optics, Zuckerberg first averred that the lawsuits had been designed simply to identify potential co-owners of his land and then compensate them adequately for their property interests. But on January 28 he decided that using the court system had been a mistake and that he was dropping the suits.

'Vault 7': "The Largest Ever Publication Of Confidential CIA Documents"; Another Snowden Emerges

Among the more notable disclosures which, if confirmed, "would rock the technology world", the CIA had managed to bypass encryption on popular phone and messaging services such as Signal, WhatsApp and Telegram. According to the statement from WikiLeaks, government hackers can penetrate Android phones and collect “audio and message traffic before encryption is applied.”

Another profound revelation is that the CIA can engage in "false flag" cyberattacks which portray Russia as the assailant. Discussing the CIA's Remote Devices Branch's UMBRAGE group, Wikileaks' source notes that it "collects and maintains a substantial library of attack techniques 'stolen' from malware produced in other states including the Russian Federation.

Google isn't just the world's biggest purveyor of information; it is also the world's biggest censor.

The company maintains at least nine different blacklists that impact our lives, generally without input or authority from any outside advisory group, industry association or government agency.

Google's blacklisting practices put the company into the role of thuggish internet cop – a role that was never authorized by any government, nonprofit organization or industry association. It is as if the biggest bully in town suddenly put on a badge and started patrolling, shuttering businesses as it pleased, while also secretly peeping into windows, taking photos and selling them to the highest bidder.

When Google's employees or algorithms decide to block our access to information about a news item, political candidate or business, opinions and votes can shift, reputations can be ruined and businesses can crash and burn. Because online censorship is entirely unregulated at the moment, victims have little or no recourse when they have been harmed. Eventually, authorities will almost certainly have to step in, just as they did when credit bureaus were regulated in 1970. The alternative would be to allow a large corporation to wield an especially destructive kind of power that should be exercised with great restraint and should belong only to the public: the power to shame or exclude.